My lengthy correspondence a few years ago led to some abortive works by one of the many public bodies, all of whom deny responsibility. The puddle could easily have been lost, but is now back in it’s full width and depth. Joe Barnes of Liverpool tweets on 18 April “…I nearly drowned…” Click on the photo for more images, then on slideshow. The conservation of this puddle (and others nearby) has been possible only through the close partnership working of Camden Council (Leisure and Recreation people), Network Rail, TfL bus stations, TfL Streets and Skanska. Prizes all round (galoshes).

25th April a truly bumper day. Not only is the main puddle bigger and more sustained than ever but we also have strong showings from nearby, less dependable, puddles. Click the picture for more.
@Steve_X Cross tweeted in amazement and @alunwgriffiths all the way from Marseille suggests nude bathing. We just have to hope it rains this hard during the Olympics so the visitors get the full beauty of it. This part of London is to be the main press base so there should be some coverage…

28 April. Continuing wet weather provokes many conversations among soggy victims and among customers of the bar which expands to 5 x its covered floorspace whenever the rain stops. There must be a risk, however, that one of the following will pass by and notice these amazing puddles and get them fixed before the Olympics: These are people who have been involved in the past:

• TfL Streets (‘not responsible’ but did twice send Micky Kenney from Ringway Jacobs to inspect). Later Sara Reynaga, Customer Service Advisor, ticket no:[601228] did get some abortive work done. Then Eva Rozmahelova expressed hope that the ownership would soon be sorted out.
• TfL Bus Stations (‘not responsible’)

• Network Rail legal department (which decided it “would not be appropriate” to send me a copy of the legal agreement which shows that they are not responsible for the puddle and that Camden is responsible) but who did then send a copy to Camden. NR really might notice as their offices all look over the puddle.

• Camden Ms Turner in Culture and Environment / Peter Stewart / Sam Monk. Peter Stewart did in January 2010 get some work done but it soon clogged up and the water still refused to run up-hill into the drains.

• Skanska appear to have done the actual work.

Could it be that HS2 is somehow involved now, trying to bring the Euston fabric into disrepair and disrepute to soften us all up to accept their monster redevelopment proposal? Support for this hypothesis is provided by the ever-growing disrepair of the entire Euston station. (The only well cared-for areas are the retail huts which have gradually emerged over recent years as a kind of shanty-town inside and outside the concourse. It’s like a smarter version of the kiosks in the main squares of Tirana when I visited.)

18 May 2012: someone has cleared the drain beside the main puddle. (Who?) Now let’s see how it goes in the rain.

Previous post on this Puddle July 2011

First post on this Puddle, September 20009

Ruth was a cornery and ungovernable person, incapable of arse-licking.  My feeling always was that this, as much as her radicalism within her work, always made heads of departments keep her (and sociology) rather at arms length.

There were exceptions, up to a point.  I think it was William Holford who sheltered / housed her in the Department of Town Planning in Flaxman Terrace and at that time (60s) she had a co-worker John Westergaard and some research assistants.  She contributed some teaching – from which I benefitted.  Her operation was already called the Centre for Urban Studies.  All her books came out in the 1960s.

I suspect it may have been Richard Llewelyn-Davies who ejected her (check that) in about 1970.  He  certainly took the huge room they had occupied and converted it into his own office – with a white shaggy carpet, multiple layers of floor-to-ceiling white curtains and a room off for his secretary and the fridge for the smoked salmon, chablis and so on.  Maybe a few Barcelona chairs.  No books.

She was then taken in by the professor of geography, Bill Meade – who I believe is still alive at about 100 so you might get a bit of oral history off him. But she wasn’t physically moved into Geography but into a house in Gower St – the corner diagonally opposite Mrs Dillon’s shop.  There she carried on the research and – at some point – started a masters course to which I sometimes contributed.  The main core of it was a lot of statistics and she was a great believer in (genuinely) evidence-based planning. But I don’t think she had much time for disciplinary boundaries and I have a sense that (while very disciplined / rigorous) she operated a discipline-free zone.  There were seminars with historians, epidemiologists, lots of demographers, some engineers on public health and planners like me.

Most of the students I recall were from India, where she had strong connections, and parts of Africa. A lot of mid-career administrators. British Council and commonwealth links.  Everything done in English.

Later she was evicted from that house because UCL wanted to sell it.  So she got moved into one big room (by then I think with no other staff). It was the ground floor room in an old house in Tavistock / Torrington Place immediately adjoining the side elevation of 26 Bedford Way.  I recall many hours spent there with the sherry and the cigarettes discussing the outrages of public policy. So I guess it was Thatcher period.

Bill Meade must then have retired because she ended up with no protective professor.  I was asked to try and get her re-homed somewhere in UCL and failed.  So in the end she withdrew to her country house at Walberswick.  I can’t put a date to that and certainly have none of the papers.

Someone in UCL archives must have files on it all.

And your geography “emeriti” will all have far more memories than I have.  Try also Richard Dennis, Adrian Forty, Irving Dworetsky (and of course John North and Negley Harte).

If anyone can add to this please comment below.

Letter to the Evening Standard
Terry McGrenara (letters 12 March) is right that housing should be a major issue in the Mayoral and Assembly elections.

At the public examination of Boris Johnson’s new London Plan a year ago many organisations argued that he should be making urgent plans to cope with the displacement of low- and middle-income people from expensive parts of London by the benefit caps and he did undertake to do a new needs assessment as soon as the Plan was finalised. Now he is proposing to delay that until 2015 or 2016 despite the fact that schools in some boroughs are already beginning to loose children because their families are being forced to move out. The situation is being made even worse by the coalition’s decision to create the new category of “affordable rent” which is really the exact opposite: rents at 65-80% of open market private rents. As this policy begins to bite many low- and middle-income Londoners who pay their rents without support from benefits will be excluded. It really does threaten to transform London from the mixed community which so many people (including Boris) claim to value to a highly segregated city.

Rather than devising counter-measures, the Mayor is now trying to change the London Plan so that the provision of housing at these new (un)”affordable” rents will satisfy the requirements for affordable housing delivery. Consultations on that close on 23 March so there is still time for concerned Londoners to object.
[ Next day: they didn't print it. ]

[ link to what you can do about it ]

Piece on the Economy for LCF Election blog  [ here ]

Here we are in a new phase of economic crisis and we need to know how our candidates would propose to handle it.

There are two major economic issues causing severe pain and suffering to London communities: the exclusion of more and more people from the opportunity to earn a living and the huge and widening gap between what people can afford to pay for housing and what it would cost them to house themselves decently. Unless we can crack these two problems we should stop waffling about being an ‘exemplary global city’ or a ‘sustainable’ city.

More and more people are becoming aware of the craziness of the situation we confront. The debates opened up by the Occupy movement are testimony to that. We are the same people with the same productive capacities and the same needs as a few years ago. The capital needed to employ us still exists—machines, vehicles, buildings—but is mothballed waiting for a recovery while firms and governments use all the money they can get to reduce their debts. Citizens, in contrast, are further impoverished and in many cases getting into worse debts as they try and keep life going.

The craziness of it all is partly an international problem, partly a national problem and things will have to change at all levels if sanity is to be recovered. But that does not mean that London is powerless.

In the early years of the recession it was widely noted that London was escaping the worst effects of the recession. It was manufacturing regions and places with lots of government back-offices which suffered the worst unemployment while London was protected by its reliance on relatively buoyant service sectors, the bail-out of banks (which are based in London) and by the continued inflow of money from even less stable parts of the world—much of it going into luxury housing and other property projects like the Shard. On top of that, London and the south east were propped up by getting the lion’s share of state investment in infrastructure, the Olympics and social housing, all programmes from previous governments which continued to run.

Even then, however, some Londoners and London employers were being battered by falling demand, closures and cancelled investment projects. Youth unemployment has reached very alarming levels, Londoners’ travel, energy and (except for established mortgage-payers) housing costs continue to rise while the real value of salaries falls. Retailing was an early casualty with large numbers of jobs lost; now we are getting the beginning of the redundancies in public service jobs imposed by the austerity regime – with more to come. In the last 3 months of 2011 London lost 28,000 public sector jobs, and gained only 15,000 private sector jobs.

So what should we be looking for our Mayor and Assembly to do?

For a start they need to accept that there is an emergency and that low- and middle-income people are worst affected – whether they are living on wages or benefits and pensions or a mixture. We therefore need measures to protect jobs, extend the London Living Wage across more of the economy—including to firms to which public services have been out-sourced—and work with unions.

Secondly we need a very strong priority to be given to reducing inequality in education and training which, in Britain, does so much to reproduce our shocking class system. Reinstating the Education Maintenance Allowance is just a start. Within that we must reinstate low-cost English language courses which have been decimated in recent years, reinforcing the economic and social exclusion of recent migrants.

These measures are all interlinked: while wages remain so low (down to zero in the case of the government’s workfare scheme) there is no incentive on employers to improve productivity, working conditions and safety. No wonder that Gross Value Added (GVA) per worker is so low in retailing and care homes compared with sectors where pay is higher. An imaginative local government can intervene in this cycle of impoverishment by setting an example, by exhortation and perhaps by giving prizes for good performance and shaming the worst offenders.

A further innovation we should be demanding is that the GLA pay serious attention to the needs and potentialities of the whole economy – all sectors, not just finance, business services and real estate. A sphere where a lot could be done is the retrofitting of energy conservation measures in our worn-out but much loved building stock. That’s an activity which is bound to be labour-intensive because every house is different so it could employ a lot of people, provide good career development linked with good training while it contributes to emissions reduction.

But the main things we should be demanding of our Mayor and Assembly are to do with the economics of housing. The problem is distinctively a London problem and there are things which can be done. Measures are needed to stop or discourage the further attrition of the council housing stock through the Right to Buy and other sales and to bring every available dwelling back into use – including the thousands of flats (no-one knows the number) which have been emptied in preparation for ‘regeneration”—unlikely to happen acceptably any time soon—and are just sitting there. We have 1200 of them on the Heygate Estate in Southwark and they are an eyesore and an insult to the homeless everywhere you go in London.

Alongside those measures we need a revival of housing construction and here public money will have to be found to do much of it. Even if we do reduce the severe inequalities of income in London we shall have high proportions of people whose needs will never be met by private market production. During the recent boom we did manage to secure some thousands of new affordable units per year (or at least the land on which to build them) through planning agreements with private developers. But that source is drying up and we’ll have to use compulsory purchase powers to acquire sites (or buildings) to meet housing needs.

These are all short-run measures. They do, of course, raise longer-run issues like the desirability of “growth”. The orthodoxy—still not dead—is the unquestioned pursuit of ever more GDP. Dozens of reports by consultants, think-tanks and public bodies focus on London’s very high levels of GDP and GDP per capita and then go on to discuss ways of achieving even more: by adding to airport capacity, relaxing limits on skilled immigration, preserving the lax regulation which makes us a tax haven and so on. On the opposite side are some campaigners who simply argue against “growth”.

What we need is a Mayor who is a bit more sophisticated, able to see that growth of some things is essential—of low incomes, of secure employment and housing, of care services for the infirm, of new energy systems—while growth in other areas can be truly damaging—carbon emissions, luxury consumption, avoidable travel. This kind of thinking is a challenge to established orthodoxy but it is surely what we need and must vote for.

The economy should be our servant, not a tyrant. In the words of Doreen Massey, we should be asking ‘What is the economy for?”

Further reading links???

Michael Edwards

UCL and Just Space network, but writing in a personal capacity.

Off to Athens for a meeting of the INURA NMM group which is people from 63 cities (not all represented at this workshop) mapping main trends in their cities on a standardised format and following a conceptual framework in which Lefevbre and Christian Schmid had strong hands. I went mainly to see old friends whom I’d missed by not going to the last big meeting, but also hoping to get inspired to pull together a serious London contribution. The London maps so far are pathetic by comparison with what the other cities did, and it was really only Mark Saunders and his crew at Spectacle who did anything at all. I seemed to be confined to bed for part of the time, shivering in the Athens cold but am glad I went. The collective work on the mapping issues seemed to go well and now I can try and rally some of our great volunteering students in an informed way to work on London. The project will clearly now have an increased emphasis on the crisis. Hitherto the Swiss leadership in the project has found it a bit too easy to overlook the dire situation… We did tend to tease them about having no crisis, and they agreed that their city was on the other end of it: receiving the money in flight from elsewhere. Not everyone was aware that the Swiss central bank had proposed negative interest rates on deposits by foreigners to avoid excess capital inflows!

Inura workshop in progress

It was strange being in Athens in these days when the nation state is basically being told to hand over its sovereignty to the IMF/EU/ECB. Discussions about all that were rather muted. Dina Vaiou commented that the much-vaunted Greek extended family, famous as the nearest there is to a welfare system, has now come under so much stress that it can hardly play that role any more. It depended on at least someone in the family having a secure job and/or pension; it depended on small family business at least ticking over. All those things are now finished in most cases and people are exhausting their savings too. It is desperate. Homeless people keeping warm round burning pallets in the square at Exarchia. The Mayor trying to close soup kitchens on the grounds of health risk! But at the airport plenty of happy rich families coming and going with skis. (The airport, the highway Attiki Odos and metro linking to the city – all of course built by German firms and (check this) still generating rent for them under PFI.)

That reminds me: strangely every single advertising hoarding between the city and the airport (and they have lots) is now blank – not just blank but papered over white… Pictures at http://bit.ly/w9YLWk Advertisers not paying their bills? Hoarding company bankrupt?

Back in London, our course on community participation in metropolitan planning resumed and we had an excellent session on participation procesess in London with inputs from Robin Brown (Hillingdon) Richard Lee (JustSpace) and Barbara Lipietz (DPU) and some good small-group discussion on what the priorities are. Jennifer was away at the AAG in New York.

Finally finished marking the essays by 54 students in the Planning Practices in Europe module which, this year, I have been doing with Elena Besussi. It has been going well and the students have mostly written good essays but 54 is a monster (virtual) heap to get through so it has been great to be able to share it. One unplanned highlight was when students expressed a strong need for a session on ex-communist countries, a topic on which neither of us is expert. Elena and I both hustled round for a speaker and we both found one within an hour of so (such is London). Thus it was that a week later Tauri Tuvikene from Tallin and Paul Hildreth, expert on Georgia, Ukraine & Albania both spoke – and triggered an excellent, very nuanced, discussion. It provoked some good critical thought even among some of those not pre-disposed that way…

Saturday 25th I suddenly decided to stop pruning apple trees in the garden and go to the inauguration, in a tunnel under Waterloo station, of My Fair London. This is a London branch of the trust based on Wilkinson’s and Pickett’s Spirit Level, focussing on Ken v Boris v Jenny v whatsisname but with some interesting borough-level initiatives including Islington. I mentioned about the importance of challenging Boris’s proposed Alteration to the London Plan which re-defines “affordable” housing in line with the coalition’s vicious new rule: 80% of locally-prevailing market rents. We have until 23 March to object. If the change goes through there will be next-to-no leverage to get social rental housing at (genuinely) affordable rents in planning agreements or Borough plans or in development schemes, and no monitoring data to gaugue the further dwindling of the stock. The London Tenants Federation response is here as a good model. and the document itself Early minor alterations to the London Plan is here, skulking behind this legalistic and misleading title.

The meeting had a high proportion of white middle-class but, as Sue said when I made the comment, I’m one of those myself.  But it was cheering to find NO familiar faces at all (except Deirdre McGrath from LCF).  Had the same experience a few weeks ago at a Compass/NEF meeting and that always makes me optimistic: it’s not just the same little group.  [ And talking of little groups we had some glee on Twitter today over the Daily Telegraph's report that just 6 people (from SWP) were behind the flight of corporate retailers from the coalition's  #workfare scheme. Are they paranoid or complacent or both? ]

Trying to find time to get a new and permanent Just Space web site up and running, to sit alongside the old one which will be frozen as an archive on the London Plan 2009/11 process. Purchased a nice new domain for it (justspace.org.uk) but haven’t yet managed to get the domain registrar to point the traffic to the new site. So for the moment access is via the old site. James from Wards Corner Community Coalition is helping.

Finally King’s Cross. The Development Forum voted to work towards becoming a ‘Neighbourhood Forum’ under the Localism Act so we have been having committee meetings and a lot of emails… We’ll see whether people want to go for it. Follow the story on the Forum blog.

Grafitti outside the immigrant centre, off Exarchia in Athens, where Inura met.

In these moods I haven’t had enough energy for serious blogging. But I have been busy on Twitter – which seems to suit me. I can just about get 140 characters out and enjoy the compression. But most of my friends aren’t there and I appreciate those who are. I do it as @michaellondonsf if you want to play. I find Twitter good on Greek situation, Occupy and the crisis. Now all the dreadful things we have been predicting in recent years are coming to pass so I have started using the hashtag #ToldYouSo – though it shows no sign of catching on yet.

Tomorrow I have to pluck up courage to do a critique of the “London World City” discourse for the LCF web site (Deirdre asked) and for other purposes + work on the Just Space response to the London Plan Implementation Plan. (Later: I did the second (here it is), not really the first: it got stuck.)

As so often, many of the things they say reach conclusions with which I agree, albeit coming from a quite differet position, but other of his conclusions are odious and flimsy. (I’ll put a link to his slides when they appear. Meanwhile this report sounds from the abstract as though it may cover the same ground.)

The core of his argument was a version of the Barker / Ball / Cheshire analysis purporting to show that the high costs of housing / offices in England result from a restrictive planning system. If he had worded it as “a result of the restricted supply of land and buildings (from various sources) confronting the particular structure of demand” it would have been better. But they do leap glefully upon the planning system as the culprit always… Although he had started by saying “we always pull the policy levers in the wrong direction”, which was encouraging, there was nothing on the tax incentives on excess acquisition of housing, nothing on the effects of demand-side subsidies, nothing on family accumulation strategies…

I did manage to say that, even if planning were relaxed, it is inconceivable that the landowners, developers, builders, investment funds etc which control the land and property markets would convert themselves to mass production for a mass market. He did then admit that the whole structure of UK development industry was inappropriate and would have to change, which would take time, but eventually a competitive market would bring prices down… He took the view that this sector’s structure was a response to the planning system…

Nothing at all about demand side factors in housing, except some brief references to easy credit…

[He's basically making a class analysis without acknowledging it: fingering rent and land ownership.]

And he had a diagram, evidently from some work of Cheshire which I hadn’t yet seen, showing retail turnover per unit of floorspace as peaking in 1986 and afterwards falling. He blamed this on the ‘town centre first’ policy starting in 1986. Ben Kochan pointed out that that policy started in 1996 while in 1986 governments were approving malls everywhere. Then someone asked whether the decline in the graph might be because it was turnover per hour while shopping hours were lengthening. Then Overman admitted that he didn’t know what the vertical axis was measuring… It would have been better if Paul Cheshire had given the talk: Paul is always very meticulous and scholarly.

The thing which shows that Overman understands a bit more than his blinkers allow him to say was an aside that, if his recommendations came to pass the strongest objections would be from CBRE etc.

It makes me realise that I must complete my long-parked Leverhulme paper and get it properly distributed.

Simon Jenkins (24 January) is right to point out how inadequate are the executive and taxation powers of the London Mayor. It would be great to see them strengthened but what would they be used for? The two great challenges London faces are surely to sustain a mixed income city in the face of escalating rents and prices and to diversity the economy away from investment banking at one end and millions of minimum-wage jobs at the other.

It’s not likely that either Ken or Boris will prioritise these fundamental issues, though Ken is the more likely. But really both are stuck in the groove of championing London’s global financial influence even though that has helped bring the world to its knees. Both are champions of Crossrail, a not very good investment but one beloved of central London property and corporate interests. London, like the nation, needs some fresh thinking, not just more mayoral powers.

A reform which might help would be to give the pathetic London Assembly more powers to generate ideas which, as a quite diverse and representative body, it might be good at if adequately resourced.

So as usual Simon Jenkins is a great stimulus, partly right and partly wrong.

Then what they actually published was this:

Both Boris and Ken are stuck in the groove of championing London’s global financial influence even though this helped to bring the world to its knees. London needs fresh thinking, not just more mayoral powers. A reform which might help would be to give the forlorn London Assembly more powers to generate ideas.

]]> http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?feed=rss2&p=869 1 http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=857 http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=857#comments Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:20:32 +0000 Michael Edwards http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=857 Usual fine orgy of eating and drinking and playing games with words. Two good big fat books came as presents: Osssie gave me Hobsbawm’s How to Change the World: tales of Marx and Marxism and Gavin gave me David Graeber’s Debt: the first 5,000 years. I have started on Hobsbawm, though I struggled with the first chapter—on the pre- and post-Marx history of socialism—because I just don’t know enough history to follow it all. But then there is a wonderful essay about, and summary of, Engels’ Condition of the Working Class… from which I learned a lot. [Gavin, you would enjoy it because it expands upon the whole publication/translation history which we corresponded about à propos Dickens.]

Now I just read an essay on the Communist Manifesto. I’d read it before as the preface to the recent 150th anniversary edition, but it’s very salutory just now. He writes

“…there was plainly no adequate ground for the Manifesto‘s belief that the moment for the overthrow of capitalism was approaching (‘the bourgeouis revolution in Germany can only be the prelude to an immediately following proletarian revolution’). On the contrary…” (p111)

and on the same page

“…due to be superseded by another kind of society (unless—the Manifesto‘s phrase has not been much noted—it founders ‘in the common ruin of the contending classes’).

The book goes on to survey the changes in Marxism, and its influence, in subsequent periods, coming almost up to date in a chapter called “Marxism in recession 1983-2000″, vastly scholarly and global in scope. Illuminates all sorts of areas I am ignorant about, especially on the early 20th Century and inter-war periods where he extends to the immense influence of Marx in the arts, music, architecture, the physical sciences and so on (and nice to find JBS Haldane and Karl Pearson of UCL figuring in here). Sometimes hilarious too: writing about what appeared to be a great flowering of Marxism in Italian universities around 1900 he says “…Italian academic intellectuals were so strongly attracted to Marxism that much of Italian Marxism was was little more than a dressing poured over the basic positivist, evolutionist and anticlerical salad of Italian middle-class male culture.” (231)

At the very end, after some painfully morose reflections on what has become of parties, he writes

“But the believers in the 1973-2008 reductio ad absurdum of market society are also left helpless. A systematic alternative system may not be on the horizon, but the possibility of a disintegration even a collapse, of the existing system is no longer to be ruled out. Neither side knows what would or could happen in that case.

…Once again it is evident that even between major crises, ‘the market’ has no answer to the major problem confronting the twenty-first century: that unlimited and increasingly high-tech economic growth in the pursuit of unsustainable profit produces global wealth, but at the cost of an increasingly dispensable factor of production, human labour, and, one might add, of the globe’s natural resources.. Economic and political liberalism, singly or in combination, cannot provide the solution… Once again the time has come to take Marx seriously.”

This sounds so like David Harvey: odd that he’s not an author H even mentions. Curious.

]]> http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?feed=rss2&p=857 1 http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=836 http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=836#comments Thu, 01 Dec 2011 17:47:40 +0000 Michael Edwards http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=836 How weird is this? I am consulted by both sides in a picketing rights issue. Yesterday, 30 November, was a day of coordinated and major strikes by public sector workers in the UK and I had some interesting calls about where it is possible to picket outside the first big public service in the King’s Cross Railway Lands – the University of the Arts (UoA or CSM) in the Granary Building. One call was from a union member in the UCU branch there. I answered that and tried to give some useful advice. Now I’ll be interested to know how they got on. But a little later someone phoned from the developer, Argent (or to be precise from Broadgate Estates who seem to be doing the site management for Argent) asking for the same sort of advice! That was a voice message and I didn’t open my messages until today. So now I have written to the Argent caller as follows:

Dear Nicolette Williamson

First of all apologies for failing to return your call yesterday morning. The day was very hectic and today I have been teaching all day and only just now turned my phone on again and got your message.

Any exchanges we have now will be of historical interest only, I guess, since the strike day is over. However I would like to get the story clear – as would you I expect.

I’m deeply amused that both the UCU local union branch and the developers (yourselves) chose to get on to me for advice on this matter. It surely is ironical.

One of the union organisers called me for advice early on Wednesday. Essentially what I said to him was that
(i) The compromise reached between Argent and Camden, and embodied in the S106 Agreement, says that the streets in KXC are to have the status of public highway while the other open spaces (squares, parks etc) will be private space under the control of Argent and their partners. I’m sure I am right about this.

(ii) The ‘streets’ clearly include Goodsway, the Boulevard and its bridge and the road which will then turn left after the bridge to run west and then north around the Granary. This is a bus route in the plan, and therefore clearly a street.

(iii) The Square in front of the Granary is a non-street and thus one of the areas which is controlled by Argent and thus NOT public highway.

That’s really all I know about the situation – and it’s what I would have said to you if I had picked up your message yesterday.

If the Boulevard is actually Argent’s private property then that could be either because
(A) I am simply wrong in my understanding set out above; or
(B) Argent has built the Boulevard and has not yet handed it over to camden for adoption and to the police for policing.

I’m delighted to hear that Argent did not try to eject the picket from what was, perhaps, Argent’s land.

Can we clarify this situation any further? What do Argent’s lawyers say? Have you asked Robert Evans?

Have you seen the London Assembly’s recent report on these issues? I think that Nicky Gavron and Jenny Jones at the Assembly would be most interested in how it is playing out at KX.

Best wishes, Michael

[Next day 2 December here is Peter Marcuse in NY writing about the need to plan effectively for spaces in which #Occupy and like forms of democracy can flourish. ]

Next day I hear from the union members in the UoA/CSM local branch. They had initial aggravation from Argent’s people but were then left alone after being firm and asserting their rights. This is their account of the events. It certainly is un-resolved.

3 Dec: Rebecca send this interesting link to Audio track on a NY radio, and crowdsourcing, and Prof Cadin who wrote a book about it. http://www.wnyc.org/shows/bl/2011/oct/19/privately-owned-public-spaces/

4 Dec: Yasminah Beebejaum (via Twitter) reports that at Salford U the security staff of Peel Holdings – developer which owns the site of “Media City” where the campus is – actually ejected the UCU picket. Details at http://www.salfordstar.com/article.asp?id=1210

]]> http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?feed=rss2&p=836 2 http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=795 http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=795#comments Fri, 18 Nov 2011 12:34:46 +0000 Michael Edwards http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?p=795 Taking part in a seminar at Birkbeck The Housing Crisis: Experience, Analysis and Response organised by Paul Watt and Stuart Hodgkinson. Very interesting indeed. Starting with ‘The financial crisis and housing in the UK’ – Graham Turner (GFC Economics) http://www.gfceconomics.com/ with a left analysis of the crisis which was rather similar to mine but – in my view – too much obsessed by the public debt problem and the inevitability of austerity. He didn’t seem to have read (or accepted) Plan B or Chick and Pettifor.

Unfortunately he left before we could argue it out. Then me (doing a more action-oriented version of my talk of July – which will be a download on their forthcoming Housing Question web site – meanwhile the slides I showed are here: Edwards BBK 20111118), then Stuart H on the history of neo-liberal ideas on housing from the 70s until now – and looking at the (truly dreadful) plans the British coalition government has for housing in the future.

Film screening: A Palace for Us (Tom Hunter, 2010) – about the Woodberry Down Estate in London. Introduced by the director, Tom Hunter http://www.tomhunter.org/ A really moving and brilliantly constructed film, essentially a reenacted oral history of wartime bombing, postwar reconstruction, stable community… daily life on the estate through to impending demolition for Barrett Homes – really valuing the estate, the society; challenging the stigmatisation.

Impressive PhD student reporting on emotional reactions to threatened displacement as social housing tenure becomes less secure… based on ethnographic work in Gospel Oak (Camden). Some very powerful and good material. ‘Mobility and security in mixed housing tenure: findings from an audio-visual ethnographic study of housing and class in an inner London locality’ – Debbie Humphry (Department of Geography, University of Sussex). [ Then a bit I missed. ]

Cllr. Rabina Khan, cabinet member for housing at LBTH. An area now deeply threatened by the government’s proposals. “Affordable rents’: LBTH committed to building at target rents (much lower, more-or-less today’s council rents) using Council’s own money on own land. Have refused to support developments which would be let at 80% [of current unregulated private rents] by providers. Trying to get developers to build mix of ‘target’ / ‘affordable’ and other units in each project – under planning powers. The LDF (local plan) calls for minimum 35% affordable dwellings in any private development, with aspiration of 50%. Absolute priority on family size units. CIL (Community Infrastructure Levy) starts 2014/15 and we are wanting that money badly. Some developers’ sites we can’t build social housing on and then we demand that they provide an even higher proportion where it is offsite. Avoiding HCA money altogether because of the requirement to do 80% rents. Also got £94m for “decent homes” programme; should have 100% of LBTH units done by 2014.
We have also re-purchased many former RTB units. We have 1700 people in under-occupation and trying to persuade people to downsize, and we meet the occupiers’ needs very near by. On ‘intermediate housing’: not the best. Of 1028 acquirers in LBTH, only 13% were former council tenants and only 11% of them were Bangladeshis. It really wasn’t a programme which served the greatest needs. We also have a lot of elderly leaseholders who can’t leave or sell and afford to stay locally. Protection of private tenants too – towards accreditation of landlords and action against bad landlords.

[gap] Inspiring talk by Sarah Glyn: a biography of the Byker estate from conception through to today, with all the episodes – drawing also on Peter Malpass’s research. A very measured celebration of how good social housing can be. Richard criticised her for suggesting that one had to search for examples of good social housing. She replied that she didn’t mean that; she had wanted to look at Byker because it was a brilliant design and even so it had problems – problems which could therefore not be attributed to poor design, but instead to these buildings and communities being ignored, rubbished…

Finally Duncan Bowie on Coalition policies. Comprehensive survey. (NB also he refers to Boris’s recent issue of proposed alterations to the London Plan so that ‘social’ and ‘affordable’ rents are merged which would entirely remove the leverage from planning to get any social rented housing. He also reports that the Localism Act has abolished the requirement for Annual Monitoring Reports.) These notes are NOT a summary of Duncan’s talk, which followed broadly his Manifesto document.

]]> http://michaeledwards.org.uk/?feed=rss2&p=795 0